


Like Home

by zanoranna (rei_c)



Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: Beginnings, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-22
Updated: 2010-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:55:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23248096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rei_c/pseuds/zanoranna
Summary: What is there left to do when everything becomes a lie? Go home.
Relationships: Xabi Alonso/David Villa, Xabi Alonso/Nagore Aranburu, Xabi Alonso/Steven Gerrard





	Like Home

This is something that he does, comes back like this: alone, worn-out, tired of the fighting. Always, always the fighting, as if there’s too much filling up the space between them so they can’t get close to one another anymore. So much there, taking up room, and always they fight. Nagore understands, doesn’t come with him; he loves his wife but this is something he does alone, can’t share his loss with her, can’t let her see the emptiness inside. 

He comes back to Madrid, to Iker and Sergio and flamenco music loud enough to drown out the quiet inside of him, to paella that fills up the holes, to Raúl and Guti who don’t ask questions but instead keep him distracted with idle gossip, with nothing that matters, no news of consequence. 

In England, he fights, fights for a place in the starting eleven, fights for his teammates, fights all the time until he doesn’t know how to do anything else except fight.

He thinks it’s his fault, at first, all the arguments, the raised voices between them, the muttered condemnation, the silence, a towering wall separating them. Fernando tries to help, Pepe tried to help, even Albert and Álvaro try to help. They run circles around him, run interference for him, but their help is never enough. They can’t help, because this isn’t about them. 

It’s about Steven, and it’s about what he is: captain, partner, player, husband, father, lover. 

Cheater. 

\\\

Xabi moves back to Spain. He can’t stay in Liverpool, can’t play under a man who knows what’s between them and does nothing to address it. He refuses to tell his agent why he wants to leave, can’t and won’t do that to the man he has loved for so long. He needs distance but he needs change, so he goes to Madrid, takes in sun and afternoon siestas, begins to piece his life back together with hot weather and the foods of his childhood. 

It’s hard being Basque in Castile; it’s a different type of fighting, an old, familiar, worn-in and timeless fight, nothing new or sharp or agonising when he moves and breathes and lives. Hard, but not as hard as staying in Liverpool would have been, difficult, but nothing like the difficulty he left behind. 

\\\

Time passes but the edge never dulls, the pain never lessens. There is still so much between them, so much left unsaid, always the fighting, always the silence. Iker tries, but Xabi is the wind and he never settles long enough, never has enough inside for a keeper to keep. Sergio tries, but he is Spain and Xabi is Spain, yes, but Sergio is sun and smiling, the churned-up sand of bullfights and the rhythm of music that Xabi never hears, and Xabi is Basque and not gypsy, has the tenacity of mountains and the chill of rain in his heart, in his blood, cold winters and rainbows in the summer. 

They all try, the team of blancos, but Xabi is as slippery and careful off the pitch as he is on it, and so they stop pushing, there but not pressing, present but not invasive. 

\\\

And then there is David. Villa, an Asturian who plays in Valencia, who left the _Mar Cantábrico_ , the mountains and the snow, the rocky shore and smooth inlet coves, for the _sol y playa_ of the Balearics. David, with his cocky smile and his patient eyes, a man used to delving deep into the heart of his opponents and emerging victorious, to making things happen. 

Xabi, so used to silence, to fighting, to the emptiness -- always the emptiness, always the quiet -- is blown back, left scrambling, stripped down to nothing, worn away like the mountains of his home under the inexorable pressure of wind and rain. 

\\\

The first international break, David looks at him, says, _You never gave a reason. Why did you leave?_ and Xabi says that he gave many reasons, had many reasons, that it made sense, and David shakes his head. _I know you, Xabier Alonso Olano,_ he says. _It was more than that._

David promises to find out and Xabi fears that he might, fears for the first time that someone might pull this secret from him, might reach into the cavern he hollowed out, deep inside, and find it laying there, waiting. 

Sometimes the cavern echoes with screams; on those nights, Xabi goes out alone, wanders the streets and watches the sun come up with a churro in one hand. Sometimes it rings with the sound of their fighting, months past but something Xabi relives over and over as if he can’t let go. When secrets are bursting at his mouth, begging for escape, on those nights, Xabi curls into Nagore and tries to sleep. If he can’t, he gets up, goes to Jon’s room, watches his son dream and prays that he will never experience the same joy as his father, because of the despair which follows.

\\\

David doesn’t give up. He is fast and quick, thinks at the speed of lightning with guesswork blessed by the saint of good fortune. David switches rooms with Cesc on the second international break, stays up late watching movies with Xabi before he says, _It was Gerrard, wasn’t it._ Xabi denies, denies everything, denies it all, but David comes closer, puts his arm around Xabi, and says, _Lie to the others, if you want, but don’t lie to me, Xabier. He broke your heart, didn’t he?_

Xabi doesn’t respond, an answer in itself. David pulls Xabi close, says, _You hold our midfield together, but you don’t need to hold yourself together with the same control. You need to let it out, to get it out, because it is eating you alive,_ and like that, Xabi curls up tight, face buried in David’s shoulder, and starts to talk. 

\\\

He talks and talks, cries into David’s neck and screams into David’s shoulder, until he’s wrung out, a different kind of quiet inside, a different kind of empty. And then he tilts his head with his swollen eyes and his runny nose and the splotches of tear-tracks dried to his cheeks, and kisses David. _Are you sure you want this?_ David asks, defiant like Asturias when Xabi is willing to give himself up. _From me, from anyone, so soon?_ Months, Xabi tells him, it has been months since he found out, and David is the first person Xabi told, so of course he wants it and of course it has to be from David, who took one look at him and knew, David who understands the highs and lows and the wind and the rain and the northern bay and the southern sun. 

Xabi presses closer, kisses David again, and David kisses back, lips and tongue quick, hands nimble like his footwork on the pitch as he strips them both of clothes, fingers deft as his mind as he stretches Xabi open, open in a different way, stretched out in a better way, and Xabi closes his eyes and gives himself over to a man different than the one he loved, the man who he could grow to love, Xabi thinks. 

_Feel_ , David says, when the two are joined and they are two people but not, when they are the same except they are so very, very different. _Xabi, please, let me help you._

David is, and does, and Xabi tells him so, and when they finish and David has cleaned them up, they climb into the same bed, and the arm that David pulls Xabi tight with doesn’t feel like lies, like fighting, like the beginning of a new pattern of fighting and quiet emptiness. It feels like David. 

It feels like home.


End file.
